[LINK] "5 Offshore Oil Hotspots Beyond the Gulf That Could Boom–or Go Boom"

[rfmcdonald]

80 Beats' Andrew Moseman lists five areas of the world peculiarly vulnerable to the human demand for oil and accident.

After the fallout from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—the dispersal agents, the containment domes, the apologies, the blame game, the court rulings over who should pay, the know-nothing punditry, and all the environmental wreckage—offshore oil drilling will go on. The cold truth is that we need the oil, and under the sea is one place we can still find it—in part because extracting it is sufficiently difficult that companies focused on easier-to-get deposits in the past.

There’s plenty of oil under the Gulf, which became perfectly clear when responders couldn’t stem the flow of the current spill, allowing thousands of barrels to leak into the water every day. But other undersea sites are loaded with oil—and are similarly expensive and risky to exploit.

The North Slope of Alaska and the Sea of Okhotsk, with their very hostile climates and inaccessibility, are two areas of concern, as is the purate-infested Gulf of Guinea off of Nigeria and Cameron, and deepwater oil reserves adjacent to politically unstable Angola or located under geologically unstable and very deep salt formations off the Brazilian coast.

Any other suggestions, people?